Dear Daughters,
Twenty-two years ago today I married your Dad (you're welcome) and it occurs to me that there are some things you need to understand: Before we were the four of us, we were the two of us and we had lots of fun and amazing adventures. Don't get me wrong, having the two of you girls is the most fun and amazing adventure we will ever know, but just in case you ever wondered why I always seem to take his side when you disagree, it's because I'm on his side. Sure, we girls know that he can be a dumb guy sometimes who just doesn't get things, but he's my dumb guy and he's your dumb guy and none of us could have hoped for better. Some day, sooner than I could have imagined, you'll both be gone and your Dad and I will be just the two of us again. Hopefully at that point, like me, and thanks to your Dad, you can look back on your lives with happiness, look toward the future with hopefulness and, if you want it, have a dumb guy by your side who helps to make the whole ride one big fun and amazing adventure. I would do this again and I would do this again and I would do this again.
Love,
Mom
That's where my facebook status today ends, where I would never put anything negative for people who know us to see. Here's just a bit more truth: Being married isn't always easy. As a matter of fact during our first year of marriage Dave made me so mad that I would have left him if it wouldn't have been too humiliating to not last even a year. Of course he's made me mad many times since, as I'm sure I've made him mad; that happens in a marriage. But here's the silver lining: You can get past anger and hurt and pettiness, and if you make the commitment to stay together, you're left with a relationship that has weathered bad times, stronger for it. We once knew a couple who got divorced: He was forty and decided he had never been happy in his marriage and left his wife for a 24 year old, had his vasectomy reversed, and started a new family. I remembered one time being over there for dinner, when he was still with his first wife, and they told a story about being dirt poor when they were first together, living in a crappy apartment, when they found a pathetic little ratty kitten. They named it Charlie and had her for fifteen years. After they were divorced, I thought of that kitten and the bond and time that it represented in their lives and that's what he will never have with the new wife: The years of being poor and struggling and overcoming the challenges of youth, together; those challenges are the forge that temper the steel of relationships.
Recently, my inlaws had their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Along with my sister-in-law, I spent months planning the details of their party. As we were leaving the house to drive to London, I was struggling with the last of the supplies I had to carry out to the car, and I heard from inside the house Dave yelling, "Are these Diet Cokes for us? Oh, I guess I'll get them," all angry and sarcastic. I could have killed him. When we got to the gas station and the girls got out to grab some Timmy's for the road, Dave said, "You're quiet. What's wrong?" I said, "Just trying not to stab you in the eye with a fork." Then in my best mocking voice, "Oh, I guess I'll get them." Not my finest moment, but it let off steam. He got out to get gas and I decided to let it go. The party was amazing; everyone, especially the inlaws, had a wonderful time and when we got home, Dave gave me a huge hug, apologised for being cranky in the morning and thanked me profusely for the amount of work I had done. The two most important lessons from this story: When Dave asked what was wrong, I actually told him. And when he had time to think about it, Dave apologised. Neither of these would have happened when we were first married and I would not want to start over again to get another relationship to this point.
And so my daughters, I do hope that you find yourselves in happy relationships one day; not that I think it takes a man to make a woman's life complete, but a helpmate can make the burdens lighter. I also hope that you can commit to actually staying together; to not let boredom or fights about money or vague dissatisfaction be reasons to break up your marriage, like so many. I promise that the little fights, in the end, don't add up to something bigger. If, however, you find child porn on his laptop, or he joins a Neo-Nazi Party, or he strikes you, even once, feel free to leave the bum and come right back home to me, to us. You will both, always, be the greatest achievements of your Dad's and my big adventure.
If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up. The white man's ships have arrived with clever men from big countries. They know our people are few in number and our country is small, they will devour us.
This is a quote from David Malo, the first Native Hawaiian ordained to preach and Hawaii's first superintendent of schools, and serves as a warning of what was to come for the Hawaiian people in the face of American hegemony. Wikipedia summarises the book well enough:
Unfamiliar Fishes traces the growing influence of American missionaries in Hawaii in the 1800s and the subsequent takeover of Hawaii's property and politics by American sugar plantation owners, eventually resulting in a coup d'état, restricted voting rights for nonwhites, and annexation by the United States. A particular focus is on 1898, when the U.S. annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and invaded Cuba, and then the Philippines, becoming a meddling, self-serving, militaristic international superpower practically overnight.
Like any book that examines the loss of a people's homeland and culture from our (the white man's winning) side of the conflict, I find this is to be a sad story. King Kamehmeha, having just united the islands into one kingdom and smashed the temples of the old gods, prepared the environment for the introduction of a foreign god. Providentially, within a few months, the first New England Christian missionaries arrived. These people arrived with the best of intentions but started a chain of events that would lead to the loss of Hawaii's sovereignty:
For Americans, Acts 16:9 (St. Paul's dream that a Macedonian was pleading for his preaching, the "Macedonian Call") is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.
Sarah Vowell explains that whether it's regime change in Iraq or bringing the gospel to heathens, however pure the intentions, intervention will always have unintended consequences. I was reminded of a story from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a conversation between an Eskimo and a missionary sent to save his soul:
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"Priest: "No, not if you did not know."Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
Why indeed? For the benefit of whose soul? I read this book because Sarah Vowell was recommended to me as a smart and funny author who brings history alive through her witty observations, but I don't know if this is the best example of her writing. The history was kind of scattershot, with many interviews with people in Hawaii today and visits to museums from Honolulu to a whaling museum in Massachusetts, and no real analysis. This is an example of the humour:
I stopped by New Bedford on one of those perfect New England October days, when the sky is blue and the leaves are gilded and the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.
Not particularly hilarious. As sympathetic as Vowell is to the Hawaiians she meets, she does share blame where it's due:
If Kalakaua had taken better care of his charge, been more mindful of just how fragile his tiny nation's independence was, if he had led with restraint and probity, if he had spent less, drunk less, gambled less, steered clear of the petty, greedy opium con, then his enemies would have been unable to swaddle themselves and their undemocratic motives in the mantle of the Magna Carta and 1776.
And she adds this thought-provoker:
I wonder what (Queen Liliuokalani) would have thought if she had known, witnessing (McKinley's) inaugural parade, that 112 years later, the first Hawaiian-born president of the United States would be inaugurated and in his parade the marching band from Punahou School, his alma mater (and that of her enemies), would serenade the new president by playing a song she had written, "Aloha O'e".
Funny how history circles back on itself. I wonder if Obama knew that he was being serenaded by a song written by the last of the Hawaiian rulers, written while imprisoned by his government, for the crime of not recognising their authority to dethrone her? In Unfamiliar Fishes, Vowell meets with a small independence group, ethnic Hawaiians who carry "We Are Not American" signs at public events, but I have to wonder to what purpose? I can't imagine the non-ethnic Hawaiians are going to leave the islands any more than the non-Natives here in Canada will be leaving to surrender the land back to the original inhabitants. I will restate that from the perspective of today, the treatment of the natives in the lands the Europeans (and their descendents in the States) wished to conquer was deplorable, but it's a bell that can't be unrung. It is heartening that some elements of Hawaiian culture, especially hula and the creation chants, were preserved for history and revived in the 1970's:
Hawaii can still be found: in the swaying hips of high school students performing hula dances down the hill from David Malo's grave; in the arms of men rowing an outrigger canoe below the cave where Queen Kaahumanu was born; in the fingertip of an old man pointing to his ancestors' names on an antique petition; and every time two Hawaiians really say hello, touching noses, breathing each other in.
Another wee complaint: although I knew that the focus of this book was Hawaii, I wish more had been done with the promise of examining all of the lands that the United States took over in 1898. It was mentioned in passing that this was the year the US took control of Guantanamo Bay (something I've often wondered about), and Guam and Puerto Rico (but why aren't they states?) and expelled the Spanish from the Philippines. I wanted more about Teddy Roosevelt and the connection between Hawaii and the Guatemalan (Panama) Canal and I wanted Hearst thrown in ("You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war!"), and more importantly, I wanted events thrown in that I hadn't heard of -- this was such an interesting time that I'm sure there were other far-reaching consequences that I'm unaware of. In the end, I was left wanting more: more history; more humour; more perspective.
Pick up this book if you're interested in: infanticide, matricide, patricide, fratricide, suicide, alcoholism, heroin addiction, porn addiction, fetishism, human cloning, incest, blackmail and religious delusions. Avoid it if a constant onslaught of the baser forms of human behaviour either offends you or bores you after listening to the audio version of Dear Husband for a couple of weeks. The way that each story started from the perspective of a reasonably normal narrator, who would then either reveal themselves to be monsters or discover their intimates were monsters, reminded me of when I read a complete collection of O. Henry stories: when you're expecting a twist, it has little effect when it comes. Perhaps these stories would be more effective if they were spread out. I also really didn't enjoy the work of the three people who narrated the version I listened to, so that probably added to my impatience.
There were some stories that worked for me overall (The Blind Man's Sighted Daughters, Mistrial, Special, Magda Maria). I did quite enjoy Landfill, likely because I can feel for parents whose son is missing and can imagine the torture of dreading, and receiving, the call from the police that he has been found, dead. Better than just the plot was the revelation of how different the son and his behaviour were from his parents' image of him. This part was chilling to listen to:
The police investigation has yet to determine whether Hector died in the early hours of March 25th in the steep-sided Dumpster behind the Phi Epsilon frat house—where investigators found stains and swaths of blood, as if made by wildly thrashing bloody wings—or whether he died as many as forty-eight hours later, after lying unconscious, possibly comatose from brain injuries, until Monday morning, and then being hauled away unseen beneath mounds of trash, cans, bottles, Styrofoam and cardboard packages, rancid raw garbage, stained and filthy clothing, and paper towels soaked in vomit, urine, even feces. At approximately 6:45 A.M. on March 27th, he was dumped into the rear of a thunderous Tioga County Sanitation Department truck and hauled sixteen miles north of the city to the Packard Road recycling transfer station, to be compacted and then hauled away again to the gouged, misshapen, ever-shifting landscape of the Tioga County landfill… Only the police investigators can bring themselves to imagine that Hector Campos, Jr., may have been “compacted” while still alive.
But then when I was looking for that passage from the story online, I discovered that there was some controversy when Landfill was originally published in the New Yorker. Apparently, "John Fiocco, Jr., a college student at The College of New Jersey, died in the same mysterious way, and was discovered in the same way (at a landfill) a few weeks later. Oates even uses the date of Fiocco's own death/disappearance -- March 25." As there are real grieving parents involved, I don't know how fair it was for Oates to barely mask the real details in her fictional treatment. Most especially since in her story the dead kid was such a creep.
The title story, Dear Husband, is a letter written by a fictionalised Andrea Yates, explaining to her husband why she has drowned their five children and taken an overdose of painkillers. I also found this to be exploitative, and the fact that she blamed her actions on the voice of God and her husband's lack of help and understanding, superficial and non-compelling explanations, didn't justify the intrusion on the privacy of the very real people left behind in that tragedy -- I would be much more forgiving if Oates had written the story with some psychological depth regarding post-partum depression, or even used it as a statement about modern society.
Other stories were painfully long, turning inside out to be entirely different stories by the end (Cutty Sark, The Glaziers) or employ cutesy devices with willful misdirection (A Princeton Idyll, Dear Joyce Carol). In the end, each is a sensationalistic tale with people behaving badly, attempting to shock the reader, and I am likely too cynical to have been properly affected.
Light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach the Earth. If a star is sufficiently far away, it could have died, been extinguished, thousands of years before its light reaches us; we are likely staring up at dead stars every night without knowing it. Reading the 1988 edition of A Brief History of Time is a bit like making a wish on a dead star -- its power, once awesome, has waned and faded. As I understand it, Hawking has updated this book a couple of times since its first publication, abandoning some theories and adding others, but since I slogged through Voyage of the Beagle when I was in grade six, I am not by temperament opposed to reading outdated science, knowing that it is a snapshot of the time and not settled fact.
I had a mild interest in physics in high school, especially in what I could understand of quantum mechanics, so my mother sent me this book when it first came out. I don't remember finding it overly difficult to read at the time but I did abandon it out of boredom. As it related to some other books I've been reading lately, I rescued A Brief History of Time from my book shelf, and found it pretty dull again. When discussing quantum mechanics once with my little brother, Kyler, he asked me, "Don't you get confused when they start talking about six or twelve or twenty-four dimensions? Don't you stop and give up when you can't get your brain around it?" He's an engineer and I'm sure his brain does stop and try to visualise the unfathomable, but I answered, "No. I just stipulate those facts-- I will assume a greater brain has justified those concepts and I take them as givens and move on." So while I might say I understand what Hawking was trying to say in this book, I likely don't understand. There are, however, some things besides the science that I found interesting this time.
One was the use of exclamation points after every lame joke. I was reading about the history of this book on wikipedia and it says that Hawking had quite a few disagreements with his publishers, who kept asking him to dumb the text down further and further. I would love to know whether these exclamation points were an editorial choice of the publishing house or if Hawking, dictating through his computer program, would monotone:
It is a matter of common experience that disorder will tend to increase if things are left to themselves period open parenthesis one has only to stop making repairs around the house to see that exclamation point end parenthesis
I also didn't realise the first time around just how obsessed Hawking is with God's role in creating the universe -- or proving that He was unnecessary:
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
It reads as though this entire book, Hawking's entire career, is a proof against the existence of God, but he hedges his bets when he ends with:
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.
Life of Pi sums up a philosophy nearer to my own beliefs: There was some kind of accident, a boat collision, a Big Bang, but the details of it will likely never be known:
"So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?"
Mr. Okamoto: "That's an interesting question.''
Mr. Chiba: "The story with animals."
Mr. Okamoto: "Yes. The story with animals is the better story."
Pi Patel: "Thank you. And so it goes with God."
Maybe the universe required a clockmaker to set it in motion, maybe it's a self-contained system with no beginning and no boundaries, but if it's fundamentally unknowable, who would prefer the less interesting option?
It's hard to read A Brief History of Time today without having some of the more lurid details of Stephen Hawking's life intrude on the mind: Was there a blowup that led to him leaving his chair at Cambridge? Did his second wife abuse him, beyond once leaving him helplessly exposed in the sun? Is he going to continue the pro-Palestine politics, boycotting speaking in Israel, even though it is the only middle eastern country with an open scientific community (not to mention significant support for people with disabilities)? It was interesting reading the biographies of Einstein and Galileo and especially Newton at the end of this book-- after reading Hawking take a few personal swipes at fellow physicists he's worked with over the years, it's funny to see that he appears to just be following in Newton's footsteps.
The most interesting fact I learned about him from wikipedia:
Hawking began his schooling at the Byron House School; he later blamed its "progressive methods" for his failure to learn to read while at the school
Imagine Hawking having had trouble learning to read; and yet he eventually taught himself to work on large equations geometrically in his mind once he was no longer capable of writing things out. It's reminiscent of Einstein failing math in school (or is that apocryphal?). In the end, if Stephen Hawking never existed, I think it would have been necessary to invent him: his story is so fundamentally inspiring, even if he downplays the role that motor neuron disease has played in his life; the race against time when he was first diagnosed and given two years to live; the eerie and futuristic monotone voice that his computer speaks in; the wheelchair-bound genius who leaves his long-suffering wife for his nurse, only to have her treat him abhorrently; all the while being one of the greatest minds in the history of physics…or is he? Many of the ideas he presents as fact in A Brief History of Time -- like imaginary time and the quantum singularity at the beginning of the universe -- were removed from later editions, apparently when disproved by other theorists. Hawking is this huge personality in a shrinking container, rumoured to soon lose his ability to manipulate his computer at all, and I don't have the perspective or knowledge to determine if he has made as significant a contribution as popular opinion states. When it comes to this book, however, if I am the intended target audience, I will deem myself worthy to judge and say that it didn't quite work for me. Perhaps a later edition…? A different work by Hawking…? Maybe time will tell...?
I was really not a philosophical child, but in what I later learned was a fairly typical experience, I remember, when I was around twelve, suddenly wondering if I could prove if anyone other than myself was actually real. I asked my best friend, Cora, if she ever wondered that -- if she ever had the feeling everyone she encountered was some kind of robot sent by a great experimenter to evaluate her actions and reactions. Cora was pretty put out that I doubted her "realness", assured me she was not a robot, and gave me the cold shoulder for the rest of the day. (Methought the robot did protest too much.) Not long after this, I had a grand epiphany and wrote out some fevered ramblings that I presented to my mother as my own unique philosophy: Since matter and space can be occupied and manipulated by humans, then time, as unalterable, must be God. Since only time existed before the creation of the universe, then the big bang was an explosion in time itself. Even the religious promise of heaven, of immortality, is simply the promise of more time; of literally joining the infinite. (I wish I had kept my manifesto, but these were the highlights.). I remember my Mom was impressed, if a little weirded out. In keeping with the eerie synchronicity that rules my life, it wasn't long after that that my mother called me out of bed one night to come down and watch a PBS show with her on the nature of time. I remembered being fascinated by the thought experiment of (some ancient Greek, maybe Zeno?) who proved that time doesn't exist at all because every moment is infinite in itself (as I remember, it was something about: If you drop a ball from shoulder high you think it will hit the ground, but first it must drop half that distance, but first it must drop half that distance, and the increments are halved infinitely-- meaning that it is impossible for the ball to ever reach the ground. Does human consciousness make sense of existence by linking together these infinite moments, merely giving the illusion of time flowing?) I watched with fascination, fitting everything into my personal theory until Einstein and Relativity were introduced. Deflated, I realised that not only had everything I thought been thought before by greater minds, but Einstein proved that time isn't an absolute, so it could no longer be my God. Years later, my Mom sent me Hawking's A Brief History of Time, but despite thinking myself predisposed to understanding it, like many others, I never finished it. Einstein's Dreams, while not actually about physics, is about philosophy, and is a much easier read.
Essentially, in this book we are introduced to Albert Einstein in 1905, just as he is on the cusp of redefining what we understand to be the nature of time. In order to get to his preferred theory, he must have imagined and discarded multiple others. With chapters dipping into selected nights from 14 April to 28 June, we are to imagine that we are experiencing Einstein's dreams and the alternate worlds therein. While I thought this book was going to be about Einstein's rejected theories for the way we experience time, it is actually a philosophical look at how we, the earthbound human beings we all are, would react to a world where time flowed differently.
Some examples:
In fact, this is a world without future. In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind. In this world, no person can imagine the future. Imagining the future is no more possible than seeing colors beyond violet: the senses cannot conceive what may lie past the visible end of the spectrum. In a world without future, each parting of friends is death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without a future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged.
In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. (Some) do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
I liked the contrast between these two worlds, one where everyone lives forever:
Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
And a world where everyone knows the exact moment where time will cease to exist:
In the last seconds, it is as if everyone has leaped off Topaz Creek, holding hands. The end approaches like approaching ground. Cool air rushes by, bodies are weightless. The silent horizon yawns for miles. And below, the vast blanket of snow hurtles nearer and nearer to envelop this circle of pinkness and life.
I chose that last quote because it illustrates the poetic language that is employed by Alan Lightman, and that was something I didn't expect from a physicist, a professor at MIT. As philosophy, I was intrigued by the idea that immortality is more confining than looming death. Throughout, I liked the language, and especially the attention to detail in describing life in 1905 Switzerland. Yet overall, I was not exposed to anything especially new or life changing in the vignettes: here are nearly 30 possible alternate universes, but given some free time, anyone could add 30 more, imagining how the alternate passages of time would impact the average person. I liked this, but didn't love it.
As a coda, I would like to add that in the 30+ years since I asked my friend Cora if she ever wondered if anyone but herself was real, no one has ever proved to me that I am not the one, true, and singular consciousness of this world. I can accept that this fact is true for everyone else as well, but I can only prove that since I think, I am.
And a further comment on eerie synchronicity: So many times I've wondered about something and had the answer provided by the universe. I remember once wondering why the alphabet we use is arranged the way it is, like why aren't the vowels grouped together? It was likely less than a week later that I picked up a book on the Kabballah, and in it there is an explanation that the alphabet is arranged the way it is now due to Jewish mysticism and the numerology associated with letters. It also explained that there is no Jewish letter associated with the number 11 (a supremely unlucky number), and most especially, not with the number 22 as it is 11-11 (the most unlucky number of all), and like so many people I've known, that number has a strange history in my life. This is just one of innumerable examples of synchronistical events that have caused me to suffer from bouts of Magical Thinking and it does not disprove the childish notion that I am living in the center of this universe; that it is uniquely interested in me. I do hope everyone else feels this way as well.
Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple— a universe.
But can you stalk the gaps when you don't even know they're there? I remember when I was in maybe grade six, I came home from school one day and my mother said that she had spent some portion of the afternoon in the backyard, lying on her back on the picnic table, watching a hawk flying in lazy circles high above her in the air. She described how it glided, rarely flapping its wings, and she felt blessed to have spent what felt like hours watching it.
I asked, "Well, what was it doing?"
"Probably looking for prey," my mother replied. This sounded exciting.
"So did you see it dive and catch something?"
"No, I just laid on the picnic table, watching it fly in circles."
I didn't get it, and on a basic level, I still don't. If it's possible, I seem to have zero connection with nature. I have firm ideas about how humans should protect animals and environments, but I am not fascinated by a cobweb, would never spend an hour engrossed in watching a spider make one. Unlike Annie Dillard, I also have an uneasiness about nature: not only would I never sit down beside a copperhead snake, I would never sleep out in the open, by myself, with just a sleeping bag to protect me. Forget about bears and cougars, what about skunks? Even curious raccoons would send me screaming. I noted when I read Dillard's An American Childhood that the author reminded me of my mother, and had she not been busy at 27 years old taking care of me, my brothers and my father, I suspect there's nothing my Mom would have liked more than to spend a year on Tinker Mountain observing the weather and the plants and living creatures, finding a way to organise them into her personal belief systems.
I was intrigued by how many quotes Dillard sprinkles throughout the book, from W.C. Fields to Einstein and Thoreau, and was not surprised to learn in an afterword that she started with these quotes on index cards, along with fascinating animal facts (The reproductive cycle of blood flukes! The migration of eels!), intending to put everything she knew into its writing. She also describes her very intentional organization of the book, not just through the four seasons of the year, but with a crescendo in the first half exploring the via positiva route to God (accumulating the world's, and God's, goodness), wiping it out with a chapter describing a flood in midsummer, and then declining from the glory through via negativa chapters (stressing God's unknowability). I think that this very deliberate structure, along with incredibly well-worded philosophising, is what won Dillard the Pulitzer Prize for this book-- the few Pulitzer winners that I've read seem to be mainly concerned with technique.
The language of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is rich but dense; it was a slow read, not because I was bored, but because I was attempting to understand, to not skip over the difficult bits.
There are examples of unknown words:
The wind shrieks and hisses down the valley, sonant and surd, drying the puddles and dismantling the nests from the trees.
(Sonant: A voiced speech sound. Surd: A voiceless sound in speech. What a perfect pairing, along with the alliteration and sibilance-- how is this not a familiar expression?)
And unknown experiences:
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous…we don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way.
When my parents retired they built a log home on a lake in the deep woods of Nova Scotia. This is the lake closest to the small village my father grew up in, where he used to swim as a boy, but though I can nearly understand why they were drawn to return to their roots, I don't really understand how it was so easy to leave all their kids and grandkids and move a 20 hour drive away. Now my mother tells me stories: about going down to the lake and watching the loons and the ducks and the turtles; boating out to the island where the eagle nests, just to watch her roost; sitting still while the hummingbirds and finches and squirrels come to her various feeders, and I still ask, "Why?" If living there does open my parents to the experience of grace as Annie Dillard describes it, it's hard to resent; since they did spend their early adult lives taking care of us, just maybe it's okay for them to spend their later years taking care of themselves:
Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.
I thought with rising exultation, this is it, this is it; praise the lord; praise the land. Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
The fact that I am not open to this experience of grace, that I spend my time diddling about with the itsy-bitsy, speaks of my own poverty of spirit, I suppose. That Dillard could still engage me, however, speaks to her writing powers.
A pop philosophy I can relate to: Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
This is where my Goodreads review ends, but it's not the whole truth of the matter-- of course I resent that it was so easy for my parents to leave us. They were so young when they had us that we always felt resented, unwanted. This is likely compounded by the fact that they're Baby Boomers, and has there ever been a more self-centered generation? There's a scene in the movie Nothing in Common where Tom Hanks is complaining to his girlfriend about how needy his aging father has become and he says something like, "All you want is to grow up and move out and have your parents come by and say 'yes, this is a beautiful home and a beautiful family and you did good', and then they should just quietly go off somewhere and die". This has always struck me as a typical Baby Boomer viewpoint, and in reverse, how my parents feel about me-- they've raised us and now they're free to just go away. It is confounding to me that they both seem to revel in nature, now, when they never did before. Do I have a lack of connection because I was never exposed to it? How can my Dad name every species of tree in his woods when he never once took us to the woods when we were little? How can my mother leave the house in the middle of a conversation because she "never misses a sunset over the water" when we were never brought to the water? It is confounding to me.
Another story: When I was in College, after being away from University for a while but never thinking of myself as uneducated, I was required to take an English course. It was taught by a professor from the U of A and the few people I met before class were intimidated, not quite sure if they were up to a University-level course. One woman I spent quite a while talking with was a middle aged Native who was studying Social Work, hoping to make a difference on her Reserve. I found her fascinating and certainly my intellectual equal. At the beginning of the first class, the professor said he liked to know something about the students he taught, and he handed out index cards for everyone to fill out with their names, age, place of birth and answer the question: What is the one subject that you would consider yourself to be the class expert on? I considered that question briefly, and more tongue in cheek than anything else, I wrote: The links between Eastern Mysticism and Quantum Mechanics. I was sitting beside the Native woman and she was stumped by what to write and wanted to see my card -- once she read it and raised an eyebrow at me, I felt a bit pompous, but it still served my purpose: to give the professor notice that I was, just maybe, a bit different from my classmates. It was also not entirely a blast of smoke: the connections I made between Eastern Mysticism and Quantum Mechanics in the reading I had done since leaving University had blown my mind. It lingers still.
While reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I was often reminded of these early forays into finding my own philosophy, and just like when I was young and pompous, I was thinking, "I'd have a different take on writing a book like this because I'd throw in some Heisenberg". And then:
In 1927 Werner Heisenberg pulled out the rug, and our whole understanding of the universe toppled and collapsed. For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics…Suddenly determinism goes, causality goes, and we are left with a universe composed of what Eddington called, "mindstuff". Listen to these physicists: Sir James Jeans, Eddington's successor, invokes "fate", saying that the future "may rest on the knees of whatever gods there be". Eddington says that, "the physical world is abstract and without 'actuality' apart from its linkage to consciousness…(We are left with) no clear distinction between the Natural and the Supernatural".
And so with this passage, Annie Dillard pulls the props out from under my vainest intellectual construct; the one topic on which I would, still, consider myself to be the expert in any given group. I was reminded of a book I read during this period called Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism. In it, as I remember, the author explains the practise of Zen and the search for nirvana through meditation. He explains that some people will find God through meditation, some like Thoreau and Emerson will find Him through a profound connection with nature, and some will need the help of psychotropic drugs. I was so fascinated by this book that I remember even telling my mother about it, which was a safe topic because I knew that I would never have the nerve to experiment with acid or peyote or whatever-- I was too deeply affected by the Go Ask Alice -type afterschool specials; I had a horror of future flashbacks in which I might try to claw a baby out of my pregnant belly. Now I find myself uninterested in psychotropics, unconnected to nature, and ambivalent about meditation: I once scared myself, thinking that I was on the cusp of the understanding that would cause me to disappear like in The Celestine Prophecy. Embarrassing to think about now, but I wonder if Annie Dillard knew all this; she wrote Pilgrim at about the same age I was when I was nosedeep in subatomic physics: The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. At the time I felt like a pilgrim myself, walking the road to revelation, until I read some other book (unremembered now) that showed how common my epiphanies were, a book where a character said something like, "We sat around all night discussing physics and mysticism, like all first year University students, thinking we were revealing the world". If I had been capable of writing a book, it may well have been an attempt at writing this book; I can see myself with a pile of index cards, my favourite quotes and amazing facts (all learned, incidentally when I WAS in University, so I don't know now why I found it to be such bullshit at the time); trying to synthesise a worldview out of the crazy soup that has been ladled out to me.
In another afterword, Dillard looks back with squeamishness at how overwritten Pilgrim reads to her now, and I can empathize. I wish I had tried to write a book in my 20's that cobbled together everything that excited me; I wish I had even held onto the essays I wrote for that College English class; even the one that was a profile on my mother that the professor called "interestingly conflicted".
Further edit, added May 2014: My mother was up visiting from Nova Scotia and she came across the street from Ken's house one night and said, "When did you start writing these book reviews?"
I said, "Huh?"
"Laura showed me your goodreads account and it's just incredible. How do I make an account and add you as a friend? I'd love to follow your book reviews."
"Oh, yeah, okay," I hesitated. "I can't do it from my phone here but I'll send you a friend request in the morning."
I thought I was safe from my mother ever discovering me on the internet, and as I would never want to hurt her feelings, I didn't really want her to read even the first, public part of this review. So, first thing the next morning, I went through my 160 book reviews on goodreads and cut out pretty much every reference to my family. I don't know if my reaction to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek makes much sense without my Mom laying out on the picnic table, but it is what it is. I'm more depressed by the self-editing I will need to do going forward, but at least I have this space here for the more personal reflections.
And, of course, after all that effort, my mother didn't accept my friend request on goodreads or make her own account as I told her she would need to. But...that doesn't mean that I'm completely unobserved...
There's a
game I like to play with Mallory, my 15-year-old daughter: We go to a bookstore and walk
shelf to shelf and she points out which books I've read. It's not like I've read thousands of books, but I have read hundreds, and she is
incredible at both remembering which books she's seen me read and guessing
which other books I might have read. (This likely belies the idea that you
can't judge a book by its cover: I am probably drawn to certain covers because
she really is very good at the guessing part of the game.) So assuming I might be the one to ask, she showed me this picture, a quote from her
favourite book, a few weeks ago and asked me if I could define
"fathom" for her:
I hesitated as I looked at the quote because I was having trouble making sense of it as a whole; just what did these words mean strung together? In what sense was fathom really being used as a verb here? Since I didn't answer, she asked, "No? You don't know what it means?" Assuming that the author used the word for a specific reason, I explained that fathom was originally a nautical term, used to measure the depths of the ocean, and even though it has come to mean "to understand", it has a nuanced meaning of much more: to explore and discover something to its depths; to understand. She nodded thoughtfully, that's about what she thought, but I was left wondering what trickery is this? Does this author weave together vaguely related words in an effort to look profound to a YA readership? Then yesterday, she asked me if I would like to read The Fault In Our Stars so she could use me as a sounding board for a big project she's doing on the book for school. It only took an afternoon to read, and to my delight, it was a wonderful read.
I couldn't help but read this book as a Mom first, and although it's narrated by the 16 year old girl with cancer, Hazel, it does justice to the experience of her parents:
There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.
And even more so:
I finally ended up in the ICU with pneumonia, and my mom knelt by the side of my bed and said, "Are you ready, sweetie?" and I told her I was ready, and my dad just kept telling me he loved me in this voice that was not breaking so much as already broken, and I kept telling him that I loved him, too, and everyone was holding hands, and I couldn't catch my breath, my lungs were acting desperate, gasping, pulling me out of the bed trying to find a position that could get them air, and I was embarrassed by their desperation, disgusted that they wouldn't just let go, and I remember my mom telling me that it was okay, that I would be okay, and my father was trying so hard not to sob that when he did, which was regularly, it was an earthquake. And I remember wanting not to be awake.
That passage had me welling up, and as it happens fairly early in the book, I was afraid that it was going to be a tragic and mawkish story and geared myself up to have my emotions manipulated-- but The Fault in Our Stars isn't an overly sad and sentimental story at all. I found it thoughtful and dramatic and poignant and funny. Sure, it's mostly gallows humour, but I thought that the language showed respect for the characters in the book and the people reading it.
Some funny parts:
"Ma'am," Augustus said, nodding toward her, "your daughter's car has just been deservingly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we'll be forced to call the police."
"How are the eyes?""Oh, excellent," he said. "I mean, they're not in my head is the only problem.""Awesome, yeah," Gus said. "Not to one-up you or anything, but my body is made out of cancer.""So I heard," Isaac said, trying not to let it get to him. He fumbled toward Gus's hand and found only his thigh."I'm taken," Gus said.
"I can only hope,” Julie said, turning back to Gus, “they grow into the kind of thoughtful, intelligent young men you’ve become.”I resisted the urge to audibly gag. “He’s not that smart,” I said to Julie.“She’s right. It’s just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.”“Right, it’s primarily his hotness,” I said.“It can be sort of blinding,” he said.“It actually did blind our friend Isaac,” I said.“Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?”“You cannot.”“It is my burden, this beautiful face.”“Not to mention your body.”“Seriously, don’t even get me started on my hot bod. You don’t want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace’s breath away,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.“Okay, enough,” Gus’s dad said.
In addition to the funny wordplay, I thought that John Green's use of his large vocabulary shows respect for his readers. Just as my daughter asked me to define "fathom", The Fault in Our Stars is rich in difficult words, and sophisticated philosophy, that might require further research.
I've always liked people with two names, because you get to make up your mind what you call them: Gus or Augustus? Me, I was always just Hazel, univalent Hazel.
The use of the word "univalent" isn't strictly necessary there, so I asked Mal what she thought of the vocabulary of this book. She said she didn't find it particularly difficult, she could parse the meaning of most words from their context, and she said that since she follows the author's youtube channel, she knows he's very smart and doesn't speak down to his audience. How wonderful! It reminds me of A Series of Unfortunate Events-- but while Lemony Snicket would define the difficult words as he went along, John Green is using language for an older readership, trusting that they will know how to find the definitions they need on their own.
And then there's the notion that The Fault in Our Stars is likely read by Cancer Kids (in the language of the book) and I think (from a perspective of zero experience with the disease) that it does a very good job of describing the experience without patronising or lionizing the kids themselves. They react with sorrow and anger and humour and self-pity, the gamut of possible responses, which paints them as human and ordinary; as more than just their diagnoses.
According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul. But this is the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.I wiped his chin and grabbed his face in my hands and knelt down close to him so that I could see his eyes, which still lived. "I'm sorry. I wish it was like that movie, with the Persians and the Spartans.""Me too," he said."But it isn't," I said."I know," he said."There are no bad guys.""Yeah.""Even cancer isn't a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive."
And:
"What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart is made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner."
And then when they meet Peter Van Houten and he's horrible and nasty, surely the first time in the postdiagnosis lives of Hazel and Gus that anyone has been so mean to them, I had to wonder what a real Cancer Kid would think while reading this part-- I'm assuming they are grateful that there's at least one character in fiction who won't treat them as too delicate to offend:
“You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation."
And:
“Like all sick children," he answered dispassionately, "you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.”
Goodreads has 800 favourite quotes listed from this book, I have selected slightly less, but that's a testament to just how good the writing is. I haven't read a lot of YA fiction, but if I had to compare it to what I know, I would rate The Fault in Our Stars above Harry Potter (not least because I'd rather fight Voldemort with magic than cancer with chemo-- only one of those situations has a possible positive outcome) and above The Hunger Games (ditto fighting other teenagers) and most definitely above Twilight (*gag*). This book, along with the strong plot and characters and language, also dips into philosophy (blatantly and obliquely), which again speaks to the author's respect for his readers:
Encouragement: Without Pain, How Can We Know Joy? (This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)
I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it -- or my observation of it -- is temporary?
We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim -- as you will be -- of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.
And although these might be considered needlepoint-on-a-pillow statements, they synthesize important parts of the book, and I like them:
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
The world is not a wish-granting factory.
I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?
I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.
It wasn't until I read The Fault in Our Stars that I could really understand the meaning of the quote Mal first shared with me: It appears on the last page of the book, and as much as it might have been a puzzle to me as a stand-alone line, I am better for having plumbed this story to its depths, to have fathomed its meaning.
Okay?
Okay.
This is the first book that Mallory has asked me to read in years. The last one was Ida B, which coincidentally also involves cancer, and which had me bawling throughout. I don't think it's easy for an author to walk the line between honesty and sentimentality, but I am grateful that my kid can recognise the difference (and also that she continues to understand me -- to fathom me? -- and what I might like).
